Cemeteries Beneath Our Skins
by Mimi Kaminoro
Summary: "The most difficult part about surviving the day was usually deciding whether or not he wanted to survive the day. It was not a barbed wire; it was a neatly painted picket fence, new and even." RyomaxFuji. [PTSD, schitzophrenia, trigger warning]. Three-shot.
1. Ch1: My Veins Feel Your Bones

**Chapter 1: My Veins Feel Your Bones**

* * *

**A/N: Hey guys, Mimi here. This is not my first time writing something like this, but it is my first time publishing something like this. Please be kind in your criticisms and suggest how I might improve my writing! This will probably be a three-chapter fic. Trigger warning ahead; implied PTSD and schizophrenia. Please enjoy the fic! **

* * *

_"When I say that it doesn't hurt, I mean that I can bear it."_  
_-Killua Zoldyck_

* * *

Ryoma is nineteen when he first realizes that if you down enough vodka, it tastes like love. It was bitter and wonderfully refreshing; it made his chest clench painfully, gave him a guilty pleasure; it was all of these simultaneously, and somehow, very very sweet.

"Stop doing this," someone says. Their voice is distorted, and strange, warbled like a bird's high call. The realization that it is beautiful strikes him and he clenches the neck of the bottle in his hand so hard it takes five entire seconds to process that he has shattered the damn thing.

The ground is hard, but it is not cold. It is warm, a wonderful embrace, and the one truth in the world. It has one job, and it always comes through; it stays there and holds him up, supports him when no one else can.

He laughs, and he finds it _strange _that his own laugh his _strange_ to him. "Stop doing what?" He groans.

These days, Ryoma cannot tell his demons from his friends. They wear the same faces and speak with the same wonderful voices.

"I can't stop; there things inside of me that I need to kill." He states coldly, feeling the alcohol spread smoothly over his hand, his _left _hand for crying out loud, and it stings like _nothing else_. What the _fuck_?

He vaguely hears crying in the hazy, blurry, euphoric background and all of a sudden he cannot hold back the laughter that bubbles up from the back of his throat, from deep within his chest. It is clear, unlike the laugh from before, and all of a sudden, the wonderful thought that there is someone in his body puts him to rest.

This fact approaches him slowly, tenderly, and swoops its large, protective hands over his eyes to shut them.

Ryoma knows that alcohol tastes better than the thought of facing his demons ever will.

* * *

"_Nobody drinks a bottle of vodka for fun, and that's a damn fact."  
-soulsscrawl_

* * *

Ryoma wakes up with the shittiest headache that has ever seared through his mind in five entire years. He wakes up screaming and unable to breathe, hands clawing, tearing at his throat, trying to rip it out.

Powerful hands find his and Ryoma clenches his fists so hard he's genuinely frightened of shattering his own hands.

_No, not frightened of; hoping to. _

"Echizen, Echizen," someone is getting on top of him, pinning down his arms and his chest swells with the fear in his heart. It pounds and _twists_, leaping up into his throat.

_Get out of me already. Rip me open, for the love of god. _

"Ryoma!"

He hears but cannot at the same time. Somehow he manages to wrench his arms free and despite a horrible stabbing sensation in his left palm, he hits his chest as hard as he can, kicks away the hands, and scrapes his nails up his arms.

"Baby, _please_," but he is having none of it, none of it; why don't they understand?

The surface underneath his is too soft and he is so utterly terrified that it will swallow him right up so he thrashes thrashes until he falls. He is scared out of his mind for a split second because _god, it did swallow him_, but then he hits the ground and all of a sudden the air in his lungs is forced out and it is so blissful that he calms down enough to convince himself to take in a breath of his own accord.

"Ryoma, Ryoma," someone is crying again. They've been doing that often lately.

"Fuji," he chokes, feeling like he has been catapulted back into his own body. "Fuji."

"God, Ryoma." Fuji sounds every bit as choked up as he is, and the tensai is scrambling to get next to him.

"No!" He shouts, instantly slamming himself up like a roly-poly pill bug. "Don't touch me, god, don't touch me!"

Ryoma has only seen Fuji's brilliant cyan eyes six times in his entire life but right now they are wide and filling with tears, hurt and confused, baffled and so utterly pained.

The rookie understands how he feels, or gets the logistics of it; other people crave touch, and intimacy and that was that, only it _wasn't_, because he _didn't _for fucks sake, and people didn't _get _that for some fucking reason, since honestly, where exactly did one put their hands on someone who hurts all over?

"Why?" is all Fuji can muster, his right hand coming to clench at his own chest, and Ryoma wishes he could take the pain the tensai is feeling and give it to himself. It killed him, how much pain he could not keep to himself. Through the wonderful process of diffusion or fate, some of it somehow always found its way to the people he wanted to keep it from.

"I'm sorry," is the only phrase he can respond with.

"What can I do?" Fuji sobs, sitting on the bed, having trouble –the understatement of the fucking _century_, and Fuji is barely 20- seeing his lover, seated, crumpled on the floor through his own tears.

"Nothing!" Ryoma violently tears at his hair, forcing his head between his knees. "Nothing, nothing-" and he cuts off with an animalistic sound, a keening.

Fuji physically restrains himself from lunging toward the rookie, because he swears this pain is so real, seeing Ryoma tear himself to pieces just to keep his lover whole, an empty and wasted logic; he wasn't saying that it made any sense, but one could still think it anyway.

He hears Ryoma mumble something, and immediately the tensai is alert.

"What?" He questions, blinking away tears.

It is soft but indisputable: "Teach me how to stop questioning my own existence."

* * *

"_My heart is so tired."  
-Markus Zusak_

* * *

Sometimes Ryoma feels like a puppet.

The feeling is something he cannot explain, something he will never endeavor to, but that is the closest he can get to it. It is as if someone snuck into his room and disassembled him as he slept, and then hurriedly reassembled him moments before woke up.

These are his good days, his detached, numb spells, when he does not have trouble recognizing his reflection and when he is okay with staring at his hands as he sits on chairs he feels he will burn away.

His bad days are when he opens his eyes in the morning and has trouble realizing that it is already two p.m. and doesn't want to distinguish the sunlight from the shadows, when the sight of his eyes forces him to take two steps back and look in the other direction. These days he feels like he has swallowed a stormy sky.

Ryoma finds it easier to love everything, everything other than himself; it is not easy, but easier. He told Fuji once that he tried to love everything, and felt like he was drowning. The tensai sighed and smiled at him: "It's because you are killing the hate inside of you."

But Ryoma had refused to look at his lover for the rest of the day, kept his arms crossed and body angled away because he disagreed intensely. It was not because the hate in him was dying; it was only because he was drowning in his own jealousy.

More often than not, Ryoma felt like he was not alone in his own body. It was like he was angry with himself for loving everything but himself. He wanted to be okay with himself, but at the same time, wished he did not feel the intense urge to be okay himself.

The biggest problem with Ryoma was getting caught between himself. The most difficult part about surviving the day was usually deciding whether or not he wanted to survive the day. It was not a barbed wire; it was a neatly painted picket fence, new and even. Sometimes it was a human-shaped shell he slowly, deliberately ran his fingers over.

He found that these epiphanies came to him in the middle of the night, when time, for some reason, moved differently as the clock hit two, and then four. Along with these epiphanies came the inevitable truths and ponderings that always accompanied the early hours of the mornings. Of them, there was one Ryoma could never let go of: the belief that he should burn in Hell for what his trauma had turned him into.

And try as he might to convince him otherwise, if Fuji could show Ryoma that he was a loveable creature there wouldn't have been a battle in the first place.

* * *

"_I know that I have lost."  
-Me_

* * *

**END**

**A/N: Please read and review, and know that you are loved!~**


	2. Ch2: On Loving Someone Who Loves Someone

**Chapter 2: On Loving Someone Who Loves Someone**

* * *

A/N: Hey, Mimi here. So this chapter is more Fuji-centered, and has a different layout. I chose five random songs from my iPod and set them to be five different segments. I only wrote for as long as the song was. Enjoy!

* * *

_"I don't fucking know." _  
_-Me_

* * *

**1. Don't You Remember.**

Ryoma knew that Fuji loved him. He knew that Fuji loved him, but the tensai never let him top. Topping meant Fuji trusted him, and Ryoma was too old to lie to himself and say that loving and and trusting were two synonymous verbs.

It was the night that he realized this that Ryoma understood how two people could lie back to back, so close that the warmth was becoming unbearable, and still be alone.

Ryoma knew he was no pillar. He was no Tezuka Kunimitsu. He was a traumatized and angst-ridden teenager.

Ryoma knew that Fuji loved him, but he also knew that Fuji didn't know what to do with someone who hasn't Tezuka.

* * *

**2. I'm a Loner.**

"Scream. Cry." Ryoma resisted the urge to violently push the tensai away. "Hit things," Fuji continued, "but don't give up."

The two were pressed flush against each other, and Fuji's arms were wrapped around him. They were supposed to be forming an embrace, but they were brambles, branches that snagged pieces of him, pieces of him he wanted to give but could not bring himself to.

He did not blame Fuji for wanting these pieces of him. They were standard in any other relationship. Any other functional relationship.

Ryoma knew a lot of the problems were his fault. Actually, the vast majority of the problems in the god-forsaken relationship were his fault. He had trouble coming into skin-to-skin contact with people. He couldn't look people in the eye. He was a loner.

"I'm sorry." Ryoma said quietly.

"For what?" Fuji laughed.

"Breathing." He exhaled.

* * *

**3. How You Remind Me.**

"You're amazing." The prince slurred, falling into his own set of brambles again.

"Ryoma, what did you take?"

That wasn't right. Why was his boyfriends voice so tense?

"Hehehe," Ryoma laughed as he struggled to get his world to stop spinning.

"Ryoma, you need to tell me what's in your system."

The tensai was met only with more laughter.

"Living with me must've damn near killed you." The arms supporting him tensed, and Ryoma pushed his boyfriend away. "Don't touch me. I told you not to touch me."

He was barely sober enough to see Fuji opening his eyes in shock, brows furrowing in confusing.

"There's nothing confusing about it Fuji. Why are you confused?"

"Why are you speaking in past tense?"

_Oi. Are we having fun yet?_

The rookie's hands flew to his head.

"No." The cat-eyed teen said, controlling his tongue with a certain degree of difficulty.

"Ryoma."

"Fuck off." He answered, to which voice he didn't know.

"Echizen!"

That Fuji had raised his voice, called him by his last name, snapped him out of his reverie.

The rookie realized he had somehow wound up on the floor and was staring at the ceiling fan going round and round. Fuji was on his knees next to him. "Echizen, please…"

Ryoma closed his eyes, frustrated. When did they get on the floor? He had been doing so _damn_ well, had gone so long without resorting to his monsters. Why were they on the fucking floor.

_Because you've forgotten how to stand, and Fuji's been standing for too damn long, supporting your dead weight. _

"Get out of me." Ryoma whispers.

_You're stuck with us. We are you. _

"So this is how you remind me?"

Fuji's cyan blue eyes reflected panic. "Baby, who are you talking to?"

"This is how you remind me of who I really am, then?"

* * *

**4. The Reluctant Heroes**

"Are you even trying?"

Ryoma's head snaps up, fists clenching automatically. On the list of things one did not fucking say to a PTSD victim, that was probably number one.

Fuji is collapsed against the kitchen countertop, and Ryoma can hear him crying.

Everything is so fucking hard for the rookie now-a-days. Taking breaths just to stay is hard enough, much less actually giving a fuck.

"Are you even sober?" Ryoma snaps back, feeling his throat clench up. "Have you ever understood me, Fuji?"

"Don't ask me to do the impossible."

Ryoma laughs caustically. "You're in a relationship with me." Even more sardonically, he says: "You love me. You're already doing the impossible."

"Ask me to love you, but not to understand you. I'm not a hero Ryoma." Fuji replies with an equally biting tone. "Heroes don't exist, and if they did, I wouldn't be one. "

* * *

**5. Iris**

Ryoma is always stunned by the intensity of the human touch. Fingertips brushing against his skin are so electric, so intense it hurts. He flinches, and Fuji quickly draws his hand back, eyes wide and guilty.

"I'm sorry." Fuji apologizes, smiling, quickly closing his eyes again.

"Don't apologize," Ryoma laughs, but it is half-hearted and they both know it.

"Sorry." Fuji says again.

It feels as if they laugh for hours.

"Ryoma?" Fuji questions. "Do you trust me?"

The rookie recoils. "What kind of question is that?"

"A genuine one."

Without answering, Ryoma steals a kiss from the tensai.

In his boyfriend's hesitance, Fuji finds his answer. He doesn't blame the rookie. If anything, he sympathizes. "I understand." He doesn't trust Ryoma either. He pauses. "Why?"

"You never stop me from falling apart."

It's Fuji's turn to recoil. "You never let me."

"I don't want you to see me." He admits. "I don't think you'd understand." The reference is not barbed; it's clean, like a whitewash. He smiles, so brokenly: "If oyu never break, you'll never learn how to piece yourself back together, right?"

**END**

* * *

_"Happiness becomes painful once you've learned to be happy with pain." _  
_-Unknown_


End file.
